Dinesh D’Souza is a right-wing pundit who has made a nice living for himself by blaming all the world’s ills on liberalism. Liberals caused 9/11 and the Virginia Tech shootings through their immoral behavior; the ’64 Civil Rights Act should be repealed; that sort of nonsense. This guy wants to be Ann Coulter but doesn’t have the adam’s apple for it.
His latest soon-to-be-bestseller, “What’s So Great About Christianity”, appears at least in part to be a screed against the recent rise in atheists who actually dare to speak out. An excerpt of his book was posted to his blog on the 19th. Predictably, he attacks prominent atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett, and predictably, his argument consists of a long-winded rehash of the old formula:
(Stuff I don’t understand) = GOD
Says D’Souza:
The Fallacy of the Enlightenment [as described by philosopher Immanuel Kant] is the glib assumption that human beings can continually find out more and more until eventually there is nothing more to discover. The Enlightenment Fallacy holds that human reason and science can, in principle, unmask the whole of reality. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant showed that this premise is false. In fact, he argued, that human knowledge is constrained not merely by how much reality is out there but also by the limited sensory apparatus of perception we bring to that reality.
Kant and D’Souza go on to say that our meager five senses are inadequate to perceive and measure reality. I agree. It’s nice, therefore, that we’ve found a couple of ways to supplement those senses and overcome some of their natural limitations.
Magnifying glasses, for instance, or thermometers. Ohmmeters, ammeters, and voltmeters, perhaps. Electron microscopes, radio telescopes, and spectrometers. Scales. Radar. Sonar. Digital imaging. Satellites. Space probes. X-ray and MRI. Wide-spectrum cameras, ultra-sensitive audio sensors, lasers, medical tests of all kinds. The list goes on, and so far I’ve only named things I saw on sale in this week’s Home Depot flier.
D’Souza assumes without offering evidence that there are aspects of reality which we can’t possibly perceive (I’m guessing even with a truckload of the above instrumentation) because of our own inherent shortcomings. Yet somehow, though we can’t and will never, ever be able to detect it or make any observations about it at all, we can know it’s there.
How?
We learn from Kant that within the domain of experience, human reason is sovereign, but it is in no way unreasonable to believe things on faith that simply cannot be adjudicated by reason.
Alright, now we get the heart of the matter. D’souza thinks that it is in no way unreasonable to believe things on faith that simply cannot be adjudicated by reason. Read that again. So I could claim with perfect reason and authority that the stars are the magical eggs of a giant cosmic chicken.
I suppose the right’s embrace of this sort of logic goes a long way toward explaining that “Iraq has WMDs”, “the surge is working”, “Bush was elected” business.
Christianity teaches that while reason can point to the existence of this higher domain, this is where reason stops: it cannot on its own investigate or comprehend that domain.
No, Christianity teaches that the universe was made by a magical invisible being who gave his creations free will and then decided to punish them for using it. Christianity teaches that this being sent his son to (temporarily) die to absolve us of guilt for a dietary mistake made by a woman who got her nutritional information from a talking snake. (The snake was punished for its insolence by, uh… being turned into a snake.)
This is the pseudo-deistic fallback position dogmatists of all kinds have to retreat to when confronted with the utter absurdity of their myths. When cornered, they say “you can’t disprove the existence of God because he’s outside of human perception” – forgetting, apparently, the numerous instances in their holy books where their deity of choice talks to, smites, or performs miracles on behalf of mortal men in the part of reality they can actually see.
Which is it? Outside our reality or butting in all the time to do the jealousy/vengeance thing? Please pick one or the other and stick with it.
I know of no atheist who’s ever claimed we know all the mysteries of the universe or that we ever will, but there is absolutely no logical progression of thought I’ve yet found that will carry us from “I don’t know” to “God did it” (or “Allah did it”, or “Vishnu the destroyer did it”, or “Chuck Norris did it”, etc.)
D’Souza will be debating Christopher Hitchens on October 22nd. Hopefully Hitch will show up sober enough to make Dinesh look silly (and not launch into one of his tirades in support of the Iraq war (which have, of late, been turning toward the genocidal.)
[T]here is absolutely no logical progression of thought I’ve yet found that will carry us from “I don’t know” to “God did it”
Oh, but you miss an important part of all this. One cannot simply make that jump from the “I don’t know” lilypad to the “God did it” lilypad without first wading through the muck of the “God’s ways are not our ways” swamp. Once this is acceptable, anything is possible.
Do you know if there is a video or mp3 of the debate between Hitchens and D’Souza?
I haven’t seen video of the event yet but there will be a link from here when it does become available.